Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.

 —Susan B. Anthony

You were born an original. Don’t die a copy.

 —John Mason

For all the advances in medicine, there is still no cure for the common birthday.

 —John Glenn

The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.

—Oscar Wilde

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.

—William Wordsworth

Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time.

 —Jean Paul Richter

 

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

 —Virginia Woolf

To divide one’s life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.

—Clifton Fadiman

Real birthdays are not annual affairs. Real birthdays are the days when we have a new birth.

—Ralph Pariette

Birthdays are good for you. The more you have, the longer you live.

—unknown

Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.

 —Robert Browning